16 Psychosis: Schizophrenia And The Affective Disturbances
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This article is from the Psychology FAQ, by Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren roffe@tag.uio.no with numerous contributions by others.
16 Psychosis: Schizophrenia And The Affective Disturbances
Schizophrenia covers a class of disturbances of thought and emotion. A
schizophrenic has severe difficulties in organizing his or her
thoughts and in relating to his or her emotions. Schizophrenia
actually means split mind, and refers to the patient's apparent
inability to organize his thoughts into a coherent whole.
After the movie, "All about Eve", which depicted a woman with multiple
personality disorder (MPD), the prevalence of MPD increased
dramatically. Also, MPD became synonymous with schizophrenia, which is
entirely different.
A shizophrenic will typically posess uncontrollable thoughts, hear
voices, and have a flattened personality: behavior is stereotypical,
behavior is rarely initiated, or both.
Describing schizophrenia to a US audience is difficult because Europe
and the USA differ in their diagnostic practice. The European
tradition, which I will lean towards in the following, has a much
narrower concept than the US, and consequently a larger percentage of
the population is diagnosed with schizophrenia in the USA than in
Europe.
Schizophernia is commonly categorized into five subgroups:
* Catatonic - the patient is, in general, extremely withdrawn and
uncommunicative.
* Disorganized - speech is incoherent and emotionally detached.
* Paranoid - the client suffers from delusions of paranoia,
grandeur, or both.
* Undifferentiated - all or most of the above symptoms are present,
none particularly much more than the other
* Residual - no particular symptoms are present, but the client is
changed and socially inept.
the validity of this classification is weak. all of the symptoms are
present in most schizophrenics, categorization is performed according
to which symptom set is most apparent.
In general, recovery from schizophrenia is rare.
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